The Clockwork Mansion

Well, as some of you know, I've had yet another computer die on me recently, been having quite a stroke of rotten luck with them, and it was the Hard disk yet again.

My computers (I've had two of my own through the years, this being the second) eat PSUs for breakfast.

Mostly it's been disks and filesystems for me.  I maintain a monthly backup schedule, but this is itself to a pair of portable HDDs, which concerns me slightly.  I'd prefer something a bit more durable as a backup media, but there is nothing else that I can afford which still gives the kind of capacity I need.

Oddly enough the keypad and power supply are always the first things to go on my computers. I've had to replace the power supply on this computer and I've only had a few issues of crap getting under the keys. I must say, my current MAC has served me well. *knock on wood* All the PC's I've ever owned have been temperamental pieces o crap. (My laptop purrrs when I dis a Dell product, especially their lousy outsourced tech support.)

Video cards, monitors, and mice get eaten on a regular basis with my machines.  They particularly like to get all nomnomnom on ATI cards, ViewSonic monitors (both CRT and LCD), and Microsoft mice.  So I have since switched to nVidia, Acer (or Dell), and Logitech.

Ram, Video Card,  PSU and Motherboard, in that order for me.  I usually wind up over heating them.

Heating has been my greatest problem, with my old crate!

Dust antelopes.

Lost a power supply to them, and I'm constantly having to clean out my heat sinks.

Quote from: superluser on October 09, 2008, 02:35:07 PM
Dust antelopes.

Lost a power supply to them, and I'm constantly having to clean out my heat sinks.

I have the closely related Lint Wildebeests.  my desk is right beside a door to the screenprint/embroidery floor.  they've fried one power supply already, and I can only hope the new one is doing ok, it's in a really tough spot to see/clean

Any non-western digital hard drive has died on me... without fail.  I've killed a few northbridges with OCing.  Last but not least, sound cards have randomly blown up on me and BSoD'd endless Windows boxes.

My Linux systems are running on 3 year old and older AMDs and low-end MBs and have yet to die of any hardware failure.

Lm_sensors FTW. Standard package in nearly every linux distro. Some motherboard vendors have monitoring software for Windows as well (at least my ABIT board has a set).

No matter what you're using, it's a good idea to have something there to keep track of temperatures and voltages so you have some warning when a potential problem is coming.

Well as I said at the beginning of the thread I have had Harddisks die on me the most. Though I did have one have a power adapter socket, it was a laptop, go bad, even after the guy who'd replaced it said it wouldn't, couldn't go bad. I'd gotten the lappy for free except for what it cost to fix it. After that it was a desktop that a friend didn't need anymore, and it was a tad temperamental, and then a Dell lappy that up and died in the middle of operation with a weird clicking sound.